to twice, and much
that I would only listen to in small bits at a time. Having willingly
conceded this, let me warn anyone who takes up Haydn against expecting
and wasting time in looking for the wrong thing, for qualities that are
not in Haydn, and are not claimed for him. Especially have we to discard
the text-book rubbish about his "service to art," the "tradition he
established," about the "form stereotyped by him." I have just said that
in his Esterhazy time he was of great service to artists, but the music
he then wrote was mainly second-rate, and I am now speaking of his best.
Here his form is clear enough, but one does not listen to music merely
for that. His form, indeed, became formalism and formality. It was
natural to a man who had spent his life in looking for a principle that
he should to a degree mistake the accident for the essence. Those first
and second subjects with the half-closes between--they became as
dreadful in their unfailing regularity as the contrapuntal formalism
they drove out of fashion. In themselves they are a weariness to the
flesh; if there were nothing but them to be found in Haydn, we should
not go to Haydn. But there was a great deal more. There was a poetic
content, a burden, if you like, a message, in his music, and it was
different from anything that had been before or has been since.

There is nothing of the gorgeous architectural splendours of Bach,
nothing of Bach's depth nor high religious ecstasy. His passion, joy and
sorrow are all milder than Beethoven's. He has little of Beethoven's
grandeur nor feeling too deep for tears or words. As for Mozart's beauty
and sadness--that blend of deep pathos with a supernal beauty of
expression that transcends all human understanding--Haydn is only with
the others in having none of it. The spirit of Mozart dwelt in some
ethereal region not visited by any spirit before nor after him. And,
finally, in Haydn there is no touch of the romantic. Romanticism was a
revolt against eighteenth-century pseudo-classicism, and it had its day,
and did its work, and went out. Haydn did not want to revolt against
classicism, nor even pseudo-classicism.

In fact, in music Haydn stands for classicism, and this is no
contradiction of what I have written about his throwing away the
formulas of his predecessors. When we talk of classical music we mean
Haydn's. He created the thing, and it ended with him. He has sanity
lucidity, pointedness, sometimes epigram